tings a little while ago that I agreed with. It has been a while since I discussed my rating and accomplishments, and I think it is important that this type of information be known to help readers better judge the source of the advice given in the article.

I’m a decent Constructed player, but I have never made it into a Top 8 of a PTQ. I have come close, and my rating has gone over 1800 (which is decent but not great and I did poorly the last Extended PTQ which will hurt my ratings a little). However, I tend to like decks that are not the best in the field but that I like to play. That means I’m always facing an uphill battle and, to be honest, my play skill is not up to the task over 7 or 8 rounds against increasingly good players.

I’m not a pushover in Limited play, but I’m better at Draft than Sealed Deck and I haven’t gotten my rating over 1700 yet. I don’t play Limited all that often, and it shows. I play tested a lot more sealed deck using Onslaught

I’m a fairly experienced player in Type 1.5. My store wasn’t running Sanctioned tournaments until fairly recently, and I have been fooling around with all sorts of different decks, and I have still managed to get to 1700 Vintage rating. I would have an even better rating if I didn’t like playing a new deck almost every week. I’m about to hit my 2 year-mark as a player and I like playing with the older cards that I wasn’t around for when they came out. That means that Cardshark and Ebay get plenty of business from me and it means that my results tend to be pretty inconsistent.

So take my opinions with a grain of salt and think carefully about what I suggest. I may be right, but make sure you agree with me before blindly following my advice. I do not present decks without testing and I am honest about what I say about my testing, but I am not in a high caliber team so I am not testing against top players.

I don’t want to take up a huge amount of space every article listing the above, but I will mention this every once and a while.

I am honest enough about myself to know I can improve. This is both as a player and as a writer and I welcome emails and comments, even if they’re on the scathing side.

Legions is coming soon, but, based on my experience, the first expansion in a block doesn’t drastically change the way decks get drafted as you’re still opening up 2 packs of the base set. I decided to take advantage of the normal 1st Sunday draft tournament at Pleasanton Sports Cards by getting a few of the other players to give me their deck lists and to discuss their drafts.

We had 24 players and ran 3 pods of eight people. When the store started the once a month draft (on my urging to get more Limited playing going on), we were worried that we might not attract the needed 8 people as drafting never seemed to catch on in the other stores in the Pleasanton area that have tried it. It never was an issue and the store in now attracting the maximum 24 people every time the draft is run (it might be possible to get up to 32 players but the store would be really, really tight for room when we’re drafting if we did).

I tried to get all the pod information (who was playing what colour). Unfortunately, I was not able to track it all down, but I did get most of it. If I do another article like this in the future, I’ll try and get Tribal information as well as colour information. It makes a big difference in Onslaught

I’m hoping that the information in this article (4 draft decks across the three pods) and the thoughts of the players doing the drafts will help others who do not often draft. StarCity Games and Sideboard Online have published some good articles that you over the cards colour (and tribe) by colour. Other than the pre-built tribal mechanics, Onslaught

has some pretty good synergy between different cards and I learn the set a little more every time I draft it.

Dave Carlson’s Draft and Deck (Pod 2)

Dave’s pod was made up of what were probably the least experienced drafters in the store. Sometimes the pod selection ends up like that as it is done completely randomly. We have been considering making one table the “tough” table and the other two less tough, but, to be honest, there is only one player in the store who is a pretty decent drafter (not me), so the tough table might not be so tough. Dave drafted these cards:

made me think for a while. It cost 8, but says, “I win”. (As you put it, any card that costs eight better say I win”). I selected it, but ended up not using it. At that point, I had many large creatures, so I figured I would rather have a big creature in play. The other card I thought about was Overwhelm

>> The first game, He played with an Elf that taps and gains life for each elf in play, since we were both playing with elves, he obtained 43 life rather quickly (this with me attacking for 8 per turn). He finished me off with a 1 / 2 Goblin Flyer. The second game my deck cooked. Out came Wirewood Elves, followed by two Wirewood Savage

. He did gain a great deal of life, but with three cards per turn, I was able to overwhelm him. We ran out of time and drew in the third match.

>> The second player was another young player, who drafted mono-black. The first game my deck fired on all cylinders with red to kill off his early creatures, and big green creatures laying down the pressure. The second game I was overconfident. I had one land in my hand, and two shocks. I should have mulliganed but I thought I could overcome that problem. Needless to say, my deck needs mana to work (19 mana sources) and was crushed. The third game was a repeat of the first.

>> The third match was going to be tough. I was playing against a very experienced player, who knows the cards and the game well. He had a great Black Green deck.

>> The first game was boring. I had one land, so I mulliganed (lesson from prior match), and I drew six, five of them land. I figured that would be good since I world likely draw into many big creatures and could play them. Wrong. I drew four lands in a row. The only spell I played Threaten

>> I might have considered playing black instead of red since there was plenty of it going around; but the Butcher Orrg is extremely powerful. I would not want to drop the blue since I had an abundance of great fliers for unblockable beats.

How did your matches go? What were the key plays?

>> Well, I won all of them. Losing only one game to a centaur glade and many giant beasts.

s mostly) and I would go into red too if I had too. I held onto this idea too much in the early picks and locked myself into playing beasts and passed a few good cards to go for some weaker beasts. I think my first pick was a Krosan Tusker

s. If I was a smart drafter I would have thrown away the beast idea after that (I later found out that my brother, who was next to me, tried for a beast deck too) and went more goblins instead. I also made a few big mistakes by passing Chain of Plasma

I splashed Black at first. But after both of these cards proving themselves to be out of place in my first match (more on that later...) I just made my deck G/R.

>> I had enough creatures I think, but having cheaper ones would have been nie. I wish I had taken the Chains and Blast to make my spell selection stronger then it was.

>> I mostly agonized over passed burn spells and not going all out Goblins.

>> Despite all my complaining about it now, the deck did pretty well. So my only real problem with it is its round 1 performance.

>>My matches...

Round 1 U/R (Drew)

Game 1: He got out some Goblin Embermages and my low removal was making me lose to pokeage at a gruelingly slow rate. I got out a Mauler, then a Lorian, and, before I can attack with my Lorian, out comes his Tephraderm

, some kind of Nemesis Lacolith reject they had to print now just to make me angry. Anyways Lorian met Derm in melee and I got blasted for 5 because of the Derm's ability to hit back at what attacks it. Riptide Biologist

joined his force and decided to stop a beast a turn. I lost a point from my Anurid and put me into a swatting range. I miscounted his creatures and swung putting him down to 3 and played my Erratic Explosion

ms were in the board at the time, so all I had to do was not draw the other Anurid with it, and guess what I get? THE ANURID! He goes to 1 and swings for 6 next turn. And if there is one thing I hate its losing to the younger kids who don't play too well and get lucky, almost suspiciously ´´lucky´´ and then listening to them brag. After this game I went G/R permanently. My swamps didn't show until too late and those Anurids were against me.

Game 2: Was my sweet revenge, sadly I can't remember it. Things were going badly for me again and I got Blatant Thieveried. No cheap Tephraderm

I complained about deals combat damage back to the creature, not the player. I'm going to go shoot myself now and probably haunt that kid for not correcting my mistake.

Match 2 U/G/W My Brother BA Walker (Don't ask)

First I want to say how odd it is that my brother and I somehow ALWAYS play each other second round, and when drafting we somehow wind up next to each other for picking every time. This works out kind of well because I just pass him rares I don't need and he rare drafts them. But the match thing is annoying.

Game 1: My beasts hit play, and he can't do anything important because he got green screwed and his critical Hystrodon

Game 2: Early smith again, but his clerics are already in healy mode so he’s a little worthless early but did discourage attacks. Jeff is getting a lot of stuff out, but his Pro Cleric Zombie/Cleric 4/2 can't be damage prevented so his blockers are only a nuisance. Wirewood Savage

I think I wouldn't change my deck much with the cards I had, but I kind of wished I had made some different picks. Advice I need to remember for next time is REMOVAL SPELLS GOOD! And get all of those things that I can if I want to play a slow deck.

[Michael – We play REL1 and usually do not have deck registration. TJ shouldn’t have switched cards in his main deck, but he didn’t know he couldn’t. I did some checking around and a many of the other players didn’t know that rule as well (probably 1/3 of the players). I’ll make sure the judge or I go over this before the next draft tournament we hold takes place.]

Michael Potter (Pod 3)

This was the strangest draft I have ever done. I have never been able to play just one colour in a draft before, but the good Black cards just kept on coming.

I had entered the draft with a fairly open mind. I wanted Red or Black if possible for the removal and I was leaning slightly towards Red because the burn could be pointed at my opponents as well as creatures. The pack I opened had a crap rare and Gus

dGNsb2FrIFNlbnRpbmVs as the best card. I like that card a lot and I picked it with the thought of going WR. The pack I was passed had no Red removal and didn’t have any top White picks. The best card I saw was Swat

Other than Jeff, I didn’t have a lot of competition for Black and I could cut Jeff and TJ off from the best cards 2 of 3 packs. There were too many players fighting over Green all in a row, so I’m betting that weakened all of their decks.

Round 1 – Michael Lauffer playing BG

Game 1 was pretty close. I was having a lot of trouble getting any damage through as he was trading creature for creature and he used Cruel Revival

and my deck stalled out a little as I needed land to play the threats in my hand. I watched my life total going down 2 a turn and he gained life to 17 over that time. I played my first swamp walker and then my second and I won the damage race at 1 life.

Round 3 – Drew Freitas playing UR

Drew won the die roll but decided to draw for game 1. Very few of my small creatures stuck around in the beginning as his removal burned them out. I did get a Nantaku Husk to stick after an Infest